Making everyone happy is impossible. Pissing them off is a piece of cake. I like cake.

Saturday, June 13, 2009

No one expects the Spanish Inquisition in Britain

It has not escaped your humble Devil's notice that our government has been happily locking people up with absolutely no justification whatsoever: I hadn't realised that these people were still locked up.

Up to 20 men regarded as Britain’s most dangerous terror suspects can challenge their detention after Britain’s highest court ruled that three of them had been denied a fair trial.

And yet the most dangerous cunt in Britain is still resident in Number 10 Downing Street, and allowed to go about his business of fucking everyone up the arse without suffering any material repercussions.

The men, who have been held under virtual house arrest under the Government’s control order regime, won the unanimous backing of a panel of nine law lords, on the grounds that the suspects did not know what they were accused of or what evidence was being used against them.

The judgment, hailed by human rights groups, means that other suspects who have not been given sufficient evidence to enable them to defend themselves can now challenge the control orders in court. One of the panel, Lord Hope of Craighead, said: “If the rule of law is to mean anything, it is in cases such as these that the court must stand by principle. It must insist that the person affected be told what is alleged against him.”

The ruling prompted calls for the scrapping of control orders, which restrict suspects’ movements on the basis of secret hearings without charge or a trial, and the acceptance instead of evidence based on intercepts, which is currently inadmissible in court.

Now, one might argue—as, for instance, David Davis does—that intercept evidence should be allowed in court (provided that those intercepts have been approved by the courts in the first place) but laying that aside for a moment, let me spell out what the government has been doing here.

The government has been locking people away without telling them what they are accused of, who has accused them and what evidence there is against said people; needless to say, they have not been given a fair trial.

What this amounts to is the bastard government locking people up because the government bloody well says that they are bad men.

As Leg-Iron says, this is very reminiscent of at least one other organisation in history.

If you were denounced to the Inquisition, you were arrested. No evidence was presented because there was no trial. You had no idea who had denounced you or why. You were not told what you were accused of. You were kept until the Inquisition decided what to do with you and once arrested, you were guilty. If you were lucky, they might let you off with a minor penance but then they might never let you go, or maybe they'd get a confession from you and then burn you as a heretic.

With no accusation it was impossible to defend yourself - how can you defend against a charge unless you know what you're charged with? Since no evidence was put before you, you could not even guess at what the charge might be. All you knew was that you had been deemed guilty of something.

Our government are not 'using methods reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition'. They are using exactly the methods employed by the Spanish Inquisition.

And we all know what a freedom-loving organisation the Spanish Inquisition was, eh? What a bastion of justice it was, what a paragon of virtue.

This is Britain in the twenty-first century: no personal hovercars, no neural nets, no peace, love and harmony, no liberal utopia. No, what we have is a government resorting to the tactics of a five hundred year old terror organisation.

Of course, the bastarding fucking government could not have done any of this without the collusion of the arseholes in the mainstream media; this opinion piece in the Telegraph—written by some authoritarian shitstained weasel named Alasdair Palmer—is an example of said complicity.

How, then, should the Government protect us from the threat posed by the men it suspects of being terrorists? Their lordships did not say. As one of them put it: "The Government has a responsibility for the protection of the lives and wellbeing of those who live in this country… The duty of the courts, however, is not a duty to protect the lives of citizens. It is a duty to apply the law." Even if applying the law puts the public in danger? Yes: especially if it puts the public in danger.

What. The. Fuck? The law is the law is the law: it applies—or should apply—to everyone, regardless of rank. And given that the law is there to protect the freedoms of the citizen from the depredations of the state, it most certainly must apply to the government.

Wherefore comes this bollocks about how the law must be enforced "especially if it puts the public in danger", Alasdair, you fucking cunt?

This is nuts. The role of the law is to promote the wellbeing of citizens, not to threaten it. Something has gone badly wrong when judges decide that it is more important to preserve the legal principle that everyone accused of a crime should have full access to the evidence against them than it is to prevent a major terrorist attack. Can anyone seriously maintain that stopping mass murder is less important than violating that legal principle?

"What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? ... And when the law was down, and the Devil turned round on you—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?

"This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's, and if you cut them down—and you're just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"

I have no doubt that Alasdair Palmer, cuntface extraordinaire, would argue that these people are locked away for "safety's sake", but that is because Alasdair Palmer is obviously a stupid cunt who is utterly ignorant of even recent history.

But plain and simple, must people be tried fairly, with the evidence against them presented so that they can argue against it, whatever they are accused of, whether it be to ricin the entire water supply of London, fiddle with kiddies or cough up the supposed proceeds of a life of crime?

Must that fair trial include all of the historic twiddles that the modern world so derides? Habeas corpus, the presumption of innocence, the right to silence, the revelation of evidence, the right to question accusers and witnesses……?

Yes, it must. For the alternative, the dropping of any of those barriers painfully (if not by design, rather through a combination of whimsy and hard won experience) built over the centuries, is a system in which any one of us can be put away, stripped of our property, our freedom, our very liberty to be at large in this country, simply by the powers that be declaring that we’re a bad ‘un.

It would be a world in which Harriet Harman, Peter Mandelson, Jack Straw, Geoff Hoon, please do add your horror list here, would be able to shuffle whoever they liked off into a twilight world of near non-existence.

And the terrors of that are a great deal worse than a tube train or three blown up of a morning. I realise that those blown up, those who lost those blown up, might not agree, but that is indeed my argument.

There is a tension between the physical safety of some fraction of us, those who might be killed or maimed by those that a just system does not jail or restrain, even if they are bad ‘uns but we cannot prove it, and the liberty and freedom of us all. And in weighing that balance the liberty of 60 million outweighs the corporeal beings of 50 people.

As Timmy points out, this may be a harsh calculation. However, as he also points out, let us look at the regimes that have abandoned the rule of law or simply ignored it—especially where the agent has been the government.

Surely the suffering and deaths caused by those regimes have vastly outweighed any possible terrorist atrocities? Yes, terrorists killed 3,000 or so in the World trade Centre, but that pales in comparison to the 30,000,000 or more that Stalin killed, does it not? 50 people were killed on 7/7 in this country but, compared to the systematic extermination of 6,000,000 Jews, that is rather small fry.

The laws are there to protect everyone—every single person—in this country; the laws are there to protect us from each other, yes, but most of all from the state.

Now, I am sure that Alasdair Palmer believes that these breaches of the law won't apply to him. Alasdair is, I would imagine, a nice, middle-class gentleman of good habits who doesn't have even the faintest shade of brown in his skin. But, as I opined some time ago, creating and maintaining these divides is precisely what this government does best.

And so people get angry and demand solutions, they demand concessions for their own particular group and guess what?—the state can help you, friend, for the state is the friend of everyone. The state is the righter of all wrongs, the great arbiter, the generous donor of largesse. And as each group is appeased so the jealousy and resentment of the others are inflamed and they demand special treatment for themselves and more shoddy treatment for "those others".

And so it is that the government have been able to put through some disgusting laws, by aiming them at groups that the other groups dislike. 42 days detention without trial?—well, it'll only apply to terrorists, and they're all Muslims or at the very least darkies, eh?

The scrapping of double jeopardy, habeas corpus and trial by jury?—well, that'll only apply to the eeevil criminals (no matter that they have yet to be proven such). Oh, and the darkies, of course. And the poor.

The confiscation of your assets before you are even found guilty, or reversing the burden of proof for the confiscation of assets? Well, that'll only apply to drugdealers and the like.

And none of these people are really human, are they? Not like me.

And that's how they get us; that's how they pass those laws. And, they say that they won't use them except in the most exceptional circumstances, and only against those people who aren't really human.

Except that, by the time that the laws have passed and everyone has forgotten about them, suddenly you find that they are not quite so exclusive as you might have thought—that they might, in fact, be used against you and not just against those nasty, inhuman drug-dealers.

I am sure that darling Alasdair cannot imagine that such laws would ever be used against a nice chap like himself; on the other hand, perhaps Alasdair would like to take a look at what tends to happen to journalists under authoritarian regimes and amend his stupid, thick, uninformed and fucking naive opinions.

What's that, Alasdair? That would never happen here? Really? Is there something in our genes that stops us from being like Germany, or Russia, or Cuba, or China, or Cambodia, or Greece, or Spain, or Italy? I don't think so, sunshine.

What has kept us (generally) safe from similar authoritarian dictatorships is the rule of law: it is precisely because we do not let our state lock people up on little more than a whim that we have continued to enjoy a democracy.

Believe me, Alasdair: there are a few laws that I would like to suspend if ever I met you, but it is as well for you that I cannot. Do you see, you pig-ignorant, dangerous, authoritarian shitbag? Do you fucking get it yet?

Let us fucking well hope so, but I doubt it: no one who could think in any critical way is, it appears, likely to be a journalist—and they certainly would not have written that article.

9 comments:

JohnR
said...

You're probably not interested, but PJM has an interview with Mark Steyn:Will soft despotism mean lights out for the West?http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/pjm-political-61309-will-soft-despotism-mean-lights-out-for-the-west/

I'm amazed that no-one's yet made the connection between New Labour & The National Party (those lovely people who gave you Apartheid) of South Africa. Both believed and practiced the following:

- detention without trial (Steve Biko etc, in SA then and various 'undesirables' in the UK, now)

– Race-based selection for employment (Harman's Equalities Bill)

I still can't believe that a Labour party would countenance detention without trial. Fecking hell!

Here are two old NP Bills that New Labour could emulate, if they already aren't being planned.

Population Registration Act, Act No 30 of 1950Led to the creation of a national register in which every person's race was recorded. A Race Classification Board took the final decision on what a person's race was in disputed cases.

My favourite...

Terrorism Act of 1967Allowed for indefinite detention without trial and established BOSS, the Bureau of State Security, which was responsible for the internal security of South Africa.

The other clever little way of preventing your critics of being heard, used (when a Minister) by Jacqui Smith, is the Fixated Threat Assessment Centre, where the police can 'identify' suspects and incarcerate them with only a nod towards any due process, and at the very least where individuals who write 'awkward' letters to Ministers can be dragged in for assessment under the mental health act. What better way to silence your critics than accusing them of being mentally ill. Google 'FTAC' or better the 'Fixated Threat Assessment Centre'. I could not believe that any such thing existed until I did so.

This cunt Palmer really is the fuckwit's fuckwit. I imagine that he relaxes by being sodomized by a dominatrix with a twelve inch strap on, dressed in SS uniform, since that seems to be what he thinks is good for the rest of us.

The other week he was writing that having the state keep your DNA profile was no worse than having a passport photo stored on file. There is really no talking to deluded twats like this, you just waste your life trying.

I saw this particular steaming dog turd of an article in the Telegraph yesterday. No comments had been enabled. I wonder why?

“If these people hold foreign passports surely there is another option open to them? They could just fuck off to wherever they came from”

That, as I understand it, is the problem. They do not want to “just fuck off” and our Law Lords, ever mindful of the “human rights” of those who are not welcome here, have prohibited their forcible deportation. Not only that, but they cannot be detained because their treatment would be “discriminatory”.

So it seems that they are free to wander around at large and possibly plot our destruction or at least tie up resources to ensure that they are not plotting our destruction. But we can comfort ourselves that we are not following in the footsteps of the Spanish Inquisition.